Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/278

248 sions, we notice that nearly always when men of the Middle Ages attempt to express æsthetic enjoyment, their emotions are caused by sensations of luminous brightness or of lively movement.

Froissart, for example, is not, as a rule, very susceptible to impressions of pure beauty. His endless narratives leave him no time for that. There are one or two spectacles, however, which never fail to enrapture him: that of vessels on the sea with their pavilions and streamers, with their rich decoration of many-coloured blazons, sparkling in the sunshine; or the play of reflected sunlight on the helmets and cuirasses, on the points of the lances, the gay colours of the pennons and banners, of a troop of cavaliers on the march. Eustache Deschamps has expressed his sense of the beauty of mills in movement and of a ray of sunlight scintillating in a dewdrop. La Marche was struck by the beauty of reflected sunlight on the blonde hair of a cavalcade of German and Bohemian noblemen. These displays of æsthetic sentiment are important, because in the fifteenth century they are extremely rare.

This fondness for all that glitters reappears in the general gaudiness of dress, especially in the excessive number of οf precious stones sewed on the garments. After the Middle Ages this sort of ornament will be replaced by ribbons and rosettes. Transferred to the domain of hearing, this partiality for brilliant things is shown by the naïve pleasure taken in tinkling or clicking sounds. La Hire wore a red mantle covered all over with little silver bells like cow-bells. At an entry in 1465, Captain Salazar was accompanied by twenty men-at-arms, the harness of whose horses was ornamented with large silver bells. The horses of the counts of Charolais and of Saint Pol were adorned in the same way, also those of the lord of Croy, at the entry of Louis XI into Paris in 1461. At festivals jingling florins or nobles were often sewn on to the dress.

To determine the taste in colours characteristic of the epoch would require a comprehensive and statistical research, embracing the chromatic scale of painting as well as the colours of costume and decorative art. Perhaps costume would prove to be the best clue to the nature of the taste for colour,